Durkheim School

The Durkheim School refers to the group of followers and close collaborators of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), mainly organized around the production of l'Année sociologique. This influential periodical, which Durkheim founded, defined the dominant outlook of French sociology in its formative period in the early twentieth century. Law and morals were central concerns for Durkheimian sociology and for two sections of the Année.

Among the Durkheimians, Paul Fauconnet (1874–1938), Georges Davy (1883–1976), and Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) produced major books on legal themes. Fauconnet analyzed the evolution of ideas of responsibility and argued that responsibility is always socially determined, despite modern society's view of it as subjective and individualized. Davy explored the social origins of contract. He used ethnographic studies of tribal societies in the American Northwest to ...